zaterdag 13 augustus 2016

Joaquin Flores

In an interview with Muslimpress.com, Joaquin Flores discusses the Turkey's coup and Washington's involvement in the coup.

Here's the full text of the interview:

MP: Are there enough evidence and facts to say that the United States was involved in the attempted coup in Turkey?

Joaquin Flores: Yes, now that we are a few weeks out, and have been able to check out all of the reports which began to immediately surface in the first few hours and days of the coup attempt, I can say with as much certainty as I'll ever have that the US was directly involved in the coup in Turkey. This had support of the NATO command at the highest level in Turkey. Of course, former Air Force Commander General Akın Öztürk has been described as the ringleader of the failed coup, and this accusation seems warranted. He is a person most trusted by the US and Israel.

There are a lot of ways to approach interpreting the facts and evidence, from the actual first words of the US establishment, spoken in the language of coup support 'continuation and stability', to the direct testimony of eye witnesses, specific people in the Turkish command who are closest to Israel and NATO, to compelling circumstantial evidence as well.

The three most important regiments which participated in the coup were part of Turkey's 'NATO Rapid Deployable Corps'. A lot of regular citizens in Istanbul, (we recall the closing of roadways), took pictures of the military vehicles, mostly troop transports. And the registration plates on these military vehicles, show that they belonged to the 2nd Armoured Brigade, which is stationed in the Istanbul district of Kartal, and the 66th Mechanised Infantry Brigade, which is based in Hasdal, together with the 6th Regiment.

MP: How do you analyze Fethullah Gulen’s role in the failed coup?

Joaquin Flores: The Gulen cult is used in Turkey in a similar way that the US uses religious cults and sects within the US military and diplomacy, like 7th Adventist, Jehovah's Witness, the Mormons, to create certain divisions of operation, based upon fealty to these beliefs. Gulen was the most preferred method of organizing US assets within Turkey - not just within the military, as NATO itself is able to organize many of these elements alongside Gulen - but also in civil society, courts, police, and other administrative-civilian areas of governance and power within Turkish society. As we know, Gülen lives in Pennsylvania and cooperates with US intelligence agencies. He is known as a major opponent of Erdogan, even though before they worked together.

It is clear now that the dust has settled that Gulen's network acted on orders from the US. The US's need to take a decisive action was clear once Kemalists with connections to the military, like Dogu Perincek, pushed the issue of radically accelerating Turkey's rapprochement with Russia and Iran, and this pushed to the fore the matter of withdrawing from NATO.

The reality is that Gülen’s structure infiltrated all the way up to the very top of the government and intelligence services. Erdogan understood the danger of this sect, but lacked any pretext to act in a decisive way. And because of the Gulen-US influence in Turkey, taking a piecemeal approach would not work. Also, some of the Gulen assets would not be clearly known until the actual coup attempt.

MP: Two top U.S. generals have been accused of being involved in the coup. What’s your take on this?

Joaquin Flores: We need only look specifically at one of these two in order to understand the dynamics of the coup. The fact remains that US General John F. Campbell was the primary organizer of a coup d'etat in Turkey, on orders from a structure in Washington. We must remember that the July 25th edition of the Turkish daily Yeni Safak, generally considered favorable to President Recep Erdogan's AKP party, also reported that General John F. Campbell was the U.S. commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a NATO-led security mission in Afghanistan. However, the fact that Yeni Safak reported this, is not sufficient. But it does reinforce clearly that the official position of Ankara is that the US supported the coup.

Setting aside all other facts, this fact alone speaks volumes. Even if the US was not involved in the coup, the fact that Ankara would use this as a 'pretext' to weaken (or even cut) ties with Washington speaks tremendously about Turkey's planned new orientation.

Substantively, let's recall that Turkish generals Cahit Bakır and Şener Topçu who backed the coup were detained in Dubai airport. Both of these men worked with Campbell in Afghanistan, leading the Turkish contingent within NATO's structure.

MP: Does it show American involvement in the coup?

Joaquin Flores: Indeed it does, however the facts I've just discussed are not the only clues in the Turkish coup plot which directly points to NATO. In order to better, or rather more clearly, demonstrate the American involvement in the coup, we have to more closely examine certain facts.

What is obviously not a coincidence is the fact that the same coup participants stationed at the Turkish Air Force, were the most NATO-integrated structures of the Turkish Military. The Incirlik Air Base, where the US military is based, was used by the coup plotters to launch the now infamous attacks on the Turkish parliament. General Bekir Ercan Van was arrested by forces loyal to Erdogan, and after which he sought asylum from the United States. In the aftermath of the coup, the power was cut to the base by forces loyal to Erdogan, and a no fly order was put into effect for US military aircraft in the area. Also, we have to include that on July 30th the base was surrounded by Turkish troops in order to thwart the possibility of a second coup attempt.

The role of US media and official statements in the first minutes of the coup attempt is critical. We cannot look at the official US statements after it was clear that the coup was failing, even there here too there are some clues, concerns about 'human rights' and so forth, coming from pro-NATO media in the EU and US. Instead, I refer again to Kerry's first statements about 'continuation' and 'order', which is the US language for supporting a coup, or legitimizing a government. From the start, there was a Western media campaign to spread disinformation, that President Erdogan had fled the country.

For example, the American news network , NBC, cited a high ranking US military as the source of their claims that the coup had succeeded and that Erdogan had fled the country. This corroborates claims that the US military was directly involved in a disinformation campaign during the most critical early minutes and hours of what eventually prove to be a failed coup attempt.

Also what is so apparent here is the fact that the majority of those arrested after the coup attempt were people related to the NATO structure. Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, spoke at a forum on security organized by the Aspen Institute last month, and here he declared - as quoted in the July 28th edition of Bloomberg, that after the coup "many of our interlocutors have been purged or arrested".

But it doesn't end there. Curtis Scaparrotti, the present NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, was also quoted in the same edition of Bloomberg and also the Washington Examiner on July 29th, as confirming all of this, in saying that:

"Some of the officers that we have our relationships with in Turkey are now either detained, in some cases retired as a result of the coup"

It is only rational for us to take these as the closest to an admission from the very top brass of NATO itself, that they had at the very least favored or supported the coup. Now, it is only logical, given NATO's relationship to Turkey and their assets, that this was more than 'support'. This was a NATO initiative, and the circumstantial evidence I've discussed so far only points in that direction.

MP: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that Turkey’s coup script was written abroad. Do you agree with him?

Joaquin Flores: All the facts I've discussed so far clearly point in that direction quite conclusively. There aren't any facts I've left out which can point in any other direction. No one can credibly talk about the known facts, which don't point directly to Gulen and Washington. And no one can credibly dismiss the known intimate connection between Gulen and Washington.

MP: What Western countries could have been involved in the coup? US President Obama has denied Washington’s involvement in the coup. What’s your take on his denial?

Joaquin Flores: While NATO is a multi-national force of the US and its transatlantic 'partners', all the evidence so far points just to the US parts of NATO.

Of course Obama has denied involvement in the coup. The US always denies these things, not matter how obvious. The same is true of nearly any accused criminal. There's really nothing more to say, but still it's an interesting question. I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to share my views and assessment of the Turkish coup.

August 13, 2016 "Information Clearing House" - For 50 years I’ve been painstakingly cataloguing the brutal militarism and human-rights violations of US foreign policy, building up in the process a very loyal audience.

To my great surprise, when I recently wrote about the brutal militarism and human-rights violations of the Islamic State, I received more criticism from my readers than I’ve gotten for anything I’ve ever written. Dozens of them asked to be removed from my mailing list, as many as I’d normally get in a full year. Others were convinced that it couldn’t actually be me who was the author of such words, that I must have been hacked. Some wondered whether my recent illness had affected my mind. Literally! And almost all of the Internet magazines which regularly print me did not do so with this article.

Now why should this be?

My crime was being politically incorrect. The Islamic State, you see, is composed of Muslims, and the United States and its Western allies have bombed many Muslim countries in the recent past killing thousands of Muslims and causing widespread horror. Therefore, whatever ISIS and its allies do is “revenge”, simple revenge, and should not be condemned by anyone calling himself a progressive; least of all should violence be carried out against these poor aggrieved jihadists.

Moreover, inasmuch as ISIS is the offspring of religion, this adds to my political incorrectness: I’m attacking religion, God forgive me.

Totally irrelevant to my critics is the fact that the religious teachings of ISIS embrace murderous jihad and the heavenly rewards for suicide bombings and martyrdom. This, they insist, is not the real Islam, a religion of peace and scholarly pursuits. Well, one can argue, Naziism was not the real Germany of Goethe and Schiller, of Bach and Brahms. Fortunately, that didn’t keep the world from destroying the Third Reich.

We should also consider this: From the 1950s to the 1980s the United States carried out atrocities against Latin America, including numerous bombings, without the natives ever resorting to the repulsive uncivilized kind of retaliation as employed by ISIS. Latin American leftists took their revenge out on concrete representatives of the American empire: diplomatic, military and corporate targets, not markets, theatres, nightclubs, hospitals, restaurants or churches. The ISIS victims have included many Muslims, perhaps even some friends of the terrorists, for all they knew or cared.

It doesn’t matter to my critics that in my writing I have regularly given clear recognition to the crimes against humanity carried out by the West against the Islamic world. I am still not allowed to criticize the armed forces of Islam, for all of the above stated reasons plus the claim that the United States “created” ISIS.

Regarding this last argument: It’s certainly true that US foreign policy played an indispensable role in the rise of ISIS. Without Washington’s overthrow of secular governments in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and – now in process – Syria, there would today be no ISIS. It’s also true that many American weapons, intentionally and unintentionally, have wound up in the hands of terrorist groups. But the word “created” implies intention, that the United States wanted to purposely and consciously bring to life the Frankenstein monster that we know and love as ISIS.

So, you wonder, how do we rid the world of the Islamic State? I’m afraid it may already be too late. The barn door is wide open and all the horses have escaped. It’s not easy for an old anti-imperialist like myself, but I support Western military and economic power to crush the unspeakable evil of ISIS. The West has actually made good progress with seriously hampering ISIS oil sales and financial transactions. As a result, it appears that ISIS may well be running out of money, with defections of unpaid soldiers increasing.

The West should also forget about regime change in Syria and join forces with Russia against the terrorists.

And my readers, and many like them, have to learn to stop turning the other cheek when someone yelling “Allahu Akbar” drives a machete into their skull.

Perhaps former CIA acting director Michael Morell’s shamefully provocative rhetoric toward Russia and Iran will prove too unhinged even for Hillary Clinton. It appears equally likely that it will succeed in earning him a senior job in a possible Clinton administration, so it behooves us to have a closer look at Morell’s record.

My initial reaction of disbelief and anger was the same as that of my VIPS colleague, Larry Johnson, and the points Larry made about Morell’s behavior in the Benghazi caper, Iran, Syria, needlessly baiting nuclear-armed Russia, and how to put a “scare” into Bashar al-Assad give ample support to Larry’s characterization of Morell’s comments as “reckless and vapid.” What follows is an attempt to round out the picture on the ambitious 57-year-old Morell.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking with supporters at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, March 21, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

I suppose we need to start with Morell telling PBS/CBS interviewer Charlie Rose on Aug. 8 that he (Morell) wanted to “make the Iranians pay a price in Syria. … make the Russians pay a price in Syria.”

Rose: “We make them pay the price by killing Russians?”

Morell: “Yeah.”

Rose: “And killing Iranians?”

Morell: “Yes … You don’t tell the world about it. … But you make sure they know it in Moscow and Tehran.”

You might ask what excellent adventure earned Morell his latest appearance with Charlie Rose? It was a highly unusual Aug. 5 New York Timesop-ed titled “I ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton.”

Peabody award winner Rose — having made no secret of how much he admires the glib, smooth-talking Morell — performed true to form. Indeed, he has interviewed him every other month, on average, over the past two years, while Morell has been a national security analyst for CBS.

This interview, though, is a must for those interested in gauging the caliber of bureaucrats who have bubbled to the top of the CIA since the disastrous tenure of George Tenet (sorry, the interview goes on and on for 46 minutes).

A Heavy Duty

Such interviews are a burden for unreconstructed, fact-based analysts of the old school. In a word, they are required to watch them, just as they must plow through the turgid prose of “tell-it-all” memoirs. But due diligence can sometimes harvest an occasional grain of wheat among the chaff.

President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney receive an Oval Office briefing from CIA Director George Tenet. Also present is Chief of Staff Andy Card (on right). (White House photo)

For example, George W. Bush’s memoir, Decision Points, included a passage the former president seems to have written himself. Was Bush relieved to learn, just 15 months before he left office, the “high-confidence,” unanimous judgment of the U.S. intelligence community that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon in 2003 and had not resumed work on such weapons? No way!

In his memoir, he complains bitterly that this judgment in that key 2007 National Intelligence Estimate “tied my hands on the military side. … After the NIE, how could I possibly explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had no active nuclear weapons program?” No, I am not making this up. He wrote that.

In another sometimes inadvertently revealing memoir, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, CIA Director George Tenet described Michael Morell, whom he picked to be CIA’s briefer of President George W. Bush, in these terms: “Wiry, youthful looking, and extremely bright, Mike speaks in staccato-like bursts that get to the bottom line very quickly. He and George Bush hit it off almost immediately. Mike was the perfect guy for us to have by the commander-in-chief’s side.”

Wonder what Morell was telling Bush about those “weapons of mass destruction in Iraq” and the alleged ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Was Morell winking at Bush the same way Tenet winked at the head of British intelligence on July 20, 2002, telling him that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” of invading Iraq?

High on Morell

Not surprisingly, Tenet speaks well of his protégé and former executive assistant Morell. But he also reveals that Morell “coordinated the CIA review” of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s infamous Feb. 5, 2003 speech to the United Nations – a dubious distinction if there ever was one.

So Morell reviewed the “intelligence” that went into Powell’s thoroughly deceptive account of the Iraqi threat! Powell later called that dramatic speech, which wowed Washington’s media and foreign policy elites and was used to browbeat the few remaining dissenters into silence, a “blot” on his record.

In Morell’s own memoir, The Great War of Our Time, Morell apologized to former Secretary of State Powell for the bogus CIA intelligence that found its way into Powell’s address. Morell told CBS: “I thought it important to do so because … he went out there and made this case, and we were wrong.”

It is sad to have to remind folks almost 14 years later that the “intelligence” was not “mistaken;” it was fraudulent from the get-go. Announcing on June 5, 2008, the bipartisan conclusions from a five-year study by the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Jay Rockefeller described the intelligence conjured up to “justify” war on Iraq as “uncorroborated, contradicted, or even non-existent.”

It strains credulity beyond the breaking point to think that Michael Morell was unaware of the fraudulent nature of the WMD propaganda campaign. Yet, like all too many others, he kept quiet and got promoted.

Out of Harm’s Way

For services rendered, Tenet rescued Morell from the center of the storm, so to speak, sending him to a plum posting in London, leaving the hapless Stu Cohen holding the bag. Cohen had been acting director of the National Intelligence Council and nominal manager of the infamous Oct. 1, 2002 National Intelligence Estimate warning about Iraq’s [non-existent] WMD.

Former CIA deputy director Michael Morell.

Cohen made a valiant attempt to defend the indefensible in late November 2003, and was still holding out some hope that WMD would be found. He noted, however, “If we eventually are proved wrong — that is, that there were no weapons of mass destruction and the WMD programs were dormant or abandoned – the American people will be told the truth …” And then Stu disappeared into the woodwork.

In October 2003, the 1,200-member “Iraq Survey Group” commissioned by Tenet to find those elusive WMD in Iraq had already reported that six months of intensive work had turned up no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. By then, the U.S.-sponsored search for WMD had already cost $300 million, with the final bill expected to top $1 billion.

In Morell’s The Great War of Our Time, he writes, “In the summer of 2003 I became CIA’s senior focal point for liaison with the analytic community in the United Kingdom.” He notes that one of the “dominant” issues, until he left the U.K. in early 2006, was “Iraq, namely our failure to find weapons of mass destruction.” (It was a PR problem; Prime Minister Tony Blair and Morell’s opposite numbers in British intelligence were fully complicit in the “dodgy-dossier” type of intelligence.)

When the storm subsided, Morell came back from London to bigger and better things. He was appointed the CIA’s first associate deputy director from 2006 to 2008, and then director for intelligence until moving up to become CIA’s deputy director (and twice acting director) from 2010 until 2013.

Reading his book and watching him respond to those softball pitches from Charlie Rose on Monday, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that glibness, vacuousness and ambition can get you to the very top of U.S. intelligence in the Twenty-first Century – and can also make you a devoted fan of whoever is likely to be the next President.

‘Wisdom’ on China

For those who did not make it to the very end in watching the most recent Michael-and-Charlie show, here is an example of what Morell and Rose both seem to consider trenchant analysis. Addressing the issue of U.S. relations with China, Morell described the following as a main “negative:”

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry listens to Russian President Vladimir Putin in a meeting room at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, at the outset of a bilateral meeting on July 14, 2016. [State Department Photo]

“We both have large militaries in the same place on the planet, the Pacific. What does that mean? It means you have to plan for war against each other, and we both do; it means you have to equip yourself with weapons systems for war against each other, which both of us do; and it means you have to exercise those forces for war against each other, and both of us do. And both sides see all of three of those things. That leads to a natural tension and pulls you apart. …”

Those who got to the end of Morell’s book had already been able to assimilate that wisdom on page 325:

“The negative side [regarding relations with China] includes the fact that … each country needs to prepare for war against each other (because our militaries are in close proximity to each other). Each plans for such a war, each trains for it, and each must equip its forces with the modern weaponry to fight it [leading] to tension in the relationship. …”

Well, Morell is at least consistent. More telling, this gibberish is music to the ears of those whom Pope Francis, speaking to Congress last September, referred to as the “blood-drenched” arms traders. Morell seems to be counting on his deep insights being music to the ears of Hillary Clinton, as well.

As for Morell’s claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin is somehow controlling Donald Trump, well, even Charlie Rose had stomach problems with that and with Morell’s “explanation.” In the Times op-ed, Morell wrote: “In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”

Let the bizarre-ness of that claim sink in, since it is professionally impossible to recruit an agent who is unwitting of being an agent, since an agent is someone who follows instructions from a control officer.

However, since Morell apparently has no evidence that Trump was “recruited,” which would make the Republican presidential nominee essentially a traitor, he throws in the caveat “unwitting.” Such an ugly charge is on par with Trump’s recent hyperbolic claim that President Obama was the “founder” of ISIS.

Looking back at Morell’s record, it was not hard to see all this coming, as Morell rose higher and higher in a system that rewards deserving sycophants. I addressed this five years ago in an article titled “Rise of Another CIA Yes Man.” That piece elicited many interesting comments from senior intelligence officers who knew Morell personally; some of those comments are tucked into the end of the article.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served as a CIA analyst from the administration of John Kennedy to that of George H.W. Bush, and prepared the President’s Daily Brief for Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

“US government has seen nothing so far that corroborates Russians allegations of a ‘Crimea incursion’ & Ukraine has strongly refuted them.”

Apparently two dead Russians don’t count for much in Pyatt’s book: perhaps Putin personally killed them, and the whole thing is a set up.

And how has Ukraine “strongly refuted” this accusation? According to the Ukrainian authorities, the captured would-be saboteur, one Yevgeny Panov, was “kidnapped” from his home town in Zaporizhia – a distance of some 200 miles – by the Russians and transported to Crimea. The Ukrainian police have solemnly announced that "We are taking all necessary measures to promptly, fully and impartially investigate all circumstances of this crime.” One has to admire the ability of the Ukrainian authorities to utter the most portentous absurdities with the perfect aplomb of a used car dealer, but of course their skills don’t even begin to approach Pyatt’s. The ambassador followed up his tweet with another that stated:

“Russia has a record of frequently levying false accusations at Ukraine to deflect attention from its own illegal actions.”

Speaking of deflection, the lobbying group for NATO, the Atlantic Council, has a long account of the incident here, notable for its obscurantism. However, after going on about various confusing “narratives” – including speculation that the saboteurs may be Russian deserters, or even that they “may not exist at all” – the pretense of objectivity forces the Atlanticists to admit, after several paragraphs of blowing smoke, that, yes,

“Because of the arrest of Panov, it has become clear that the Armyansk incident was not invented by the FSB, as many have claimed online, though details provided are difficult to verify.”

Well, that’s progress, at any rate: acknowledging reality. And of course the details aredifficult to verify, since Western “news” accounts are heavily colored, like this NPR piece which doesn’t mention that the Russians captured several of the saboteurs, and doesn’t mention Panov, but wonders why the Russians “waited three days” to report the incident. This Bloomberg account has not one detail about the incident: instead, we are treated to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s denials that anything at all took place, “analysis” by an “expert” that “no one trusts” anybody else, calculations on the sinking of the Ukrainian currency, and warnings about how Putin supposedly has a habit of launching military operations in the midst of the Olympic games. ThisAssociated Press dispatch, published in the New York Times, is similarly bereft of details, and gets the number of Russian casualties wrong: they claim only one Russian died. The rest is “analysis” by various “experts,” claiming that the whole thing is a diversion – oddly, the same line peddled by Ambassador Pyatt – to which are added the author’s own description of Putin’s reaction as “menacing.” The BBC helpfully adds that, while Panov may have been a “volunteer” fighter, he was “more recently” associated with “a charitable organization.”

Since when do members of “charitable” organizations wear camouflage while sneaking over heavily-guarded borders in the dead of night?

So there’s an effective embargo on reliable news from this dark corner of the battlefield between East and West. Yet it’s possible, if we glean facts from disparate sources, to outline how the incident unfolded. CNN, after shilly-shallying for four or five paragraphs – reporting Poroshenko’s denials and Ukrainian military measures to counteract a long-touted and entirely mythical Russian “invasion” – finally coughs up some facts, citing Tass:

“The report said Russian forces spotted the ‘saboteurs’ and while attempting to detain them, found ‘20 improvised explosive devices containing more than 40 kilograms of TNT equivalent, ammunition, fuses, antipersonnel and magnetic bombs, grenades and the Ukrainian armed forces’ standard special weapons.’ It said two Russian servicemen were killed in ensuing clashes.”

According to the Russian daily Kommersant, the Ukrainian incursion occurred on August 7, when Russian intelligence detected the entry of a group of seven armed men in an inflatable boat who passed through the Gulf of Perekop from Ukraine, entering Crimean territory near the town of Armyansk. The men were wearing “Soviet-style” camouflage uniforms, apparently trying to give the impression that they were Russian troops. They were intercepted and a shootout followed, in which several on both sides were wounded and one Russian FSB agent was killed. A second confrontation occurred when, the next day, Russian forces identified one of the saboteurs and followed him into an ambush: Ukrainian military positioned on the border opened fire and a second group crossed the border as the FSB personnel pursued their quarry. One Russian soldier was killed in the ensuing exchange.

At least two of the infiltrators were killed, and of those in the first group five were captured: a total of ten people have been detained, including Panov. Some had Russian passports and the majority are residents of Crimea. Kommersant also said those captured admitted they were engaged in sabotage, acting under orders from Ukrainian intelligence; their objective was to plant bombs at tourist sites and incite panic, effectively destroying Crimea’s lucrative tourist industry, although they denied wanting to kill anyone.

Oh, of course not!

Tass is reporting that Panov has not only confessed that the operation was carried out under the direction of the Ukrainian secret service, but he has identified some of them by name. His taped statement was broadcast over the Rossiya’24 news channel.

Now we have Newsweek “reporting” the preposterous Ukrainian “spin” on this botched incursion: it was really a “shootout involving Russian federal security agents (FSB) and Russian armed forces on the Crimean regional border”! Yes, the Russians were shooting at themselves. Ukrainian propaganda usually borders on the fantastic, but this marks a new level of crudity even for them.

So why should we care about this showdown at the Ukrainian corral, anyway?

It’s important because the Ukrainians – like the rest of the world – have been watching the US presidential campaign, and they don’t like what they see. Donald Trump, while disdaining to get involved in Ukraine’s feud with the Kremlin, is asking“Wouldn’t it be good if we could get along with Russia?” This has provoked the Ukrainians into paroxysms of spittle-flecked hysteria. On the other hand, Hillary Clinton is openly accusing Donald Trump of being a Russian agent: former CIA chief Mike Morrell, in the process of endorsing her, said Trump is an “unwitting agent” of the FSB. And the “mainstream” media, which is brazenly campaigning on Clinton’s behalf, has been playing the Trump-is-a-Russian-stooge card for all it’s worth.

In short, the leaders of Ukraine hate Trump, have continually denounced him, and are openly rooting for a Clinton victory in November: by launching a terrorist attack on Crimea, and before that trying to assassinate the President of the rebellious Luhansk Republic in eastern Ukraine – they put a bomb under his car, seriously injuring him – they hope to provoke Putin into taking military action. And voila!, we have an “October surprise” – with Hillary taking a hard-line anti-Russian stance, and Trump put in the position of seeming to defend Russian “aggression.”

It’s a perfect set up, for both the Ukrainians – who have been chafing at President Obama’s refusal to provide them with deadly arms – and for Hillary, whose McCarthyite campaign against Trump has taken on all the trappings of a cold war fear-fest of the sort we haven’t seen since the 1950s.

This is the price we pay as a global empire, with our noses stuck in the internal affairs of practically every nation on earth: our clients continually plot and scheme to insert themselves into our internal affairs, including our elections. Intervention is a two-way street.

Russia has lost two servicemen: Putin isn’t going to let this go. And neither are the Ukrainian coup leaders, who came to power by overthrowing the elected President and have a very tenuous hold on power. They need perpetual war scares to keep the populace diverted from their pathetic economic plight and the growingrepressionexercised by the regime. And certainly Hillary Clinton is ready, willing, and able to use a looming Ukrainian “crisis” to claw her way to the White House – even if she has to risk a nuclear showdown with the Russians. After all, what’s the mere prospect of World War III compared to the supreme importance of installing the First Woman President in the Oval Office?

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.

Politicians lie; like her husband, Hillary Clinton lies more than most.

Donald Trump lies too, of course; but most of the false claims and nonsense assertions he makes aren’t lies. Lying requires awareness and intent; Trump says whatever pops into his head.

Nevertheless, as from the mouths of babes, words of truth do sometimes come forth from the Donald’s out-of-control rants.

An example: his contention that “the system is rigged.” He is right about that; it is rigged. But not in the way he seems to think.

The Donald’s Dilemma

It would be difficult to imagine a more implausible tribune of the people than Donald Trump.

It is harder still to think of him as an elected official of any kind, much less a President.

But the man does have certain strengths. He is shrewd, for example; and to be shrewd, he must be at least somewhat in touch with reality.

To the extent that he is, he has to be wondering what the hell he was thinking when he threw his hat into the ring.

My guess is that he thought of a run for the White House in the way that, years ago, he thought about becoming a TV personality. He saw it as a way to promote himself and his brand.

Had his campaign foundered from the start, as everybody thought it would, he might have been right. But, egotist that he is, he must also have thought about what would happen if his campaign somehow took off.

Did he take the unrelenting scrutiny he would then have to endure into account? Did he stop to think about what it would be like to be demonized by America’s political, economic and media elites?

We will probably never know.

Perhaps he couldn’t pass up a chance, however remote, for adulation. But how could he not have been wary of the harm that his campaign could do to his reputation and his brand?

A wiser Donald would have gotten out while there was time, but wisdom is not Trump’s forte.

If it were, he’d have gone back to building over-the-top pleasure domes, flaunting his wealth, and parading around with his trophy wife, relying on tabloid journalists to tell the world of his exploits.

Instead, he unleashed a process that has he can no longer control.

Could it just be that he cannot stand to lose – especially to a girl?

Losing to Hillary must really get his goat. The Donald has known the Clintons too long, and dealt with them too many times, to have any respect for either of them.

So the poor bastard is stuck.

To motivate people to vote – for Hillary, but also “down ticket” — Democrats want people to think that Trump could actually win. Because it is good for their ratings, media moguls are helping them all they can, calling on Washington “insiders” too dense to know better to make their case.

But Trump is on track for losing big in November; and, at some level, he must realize what lies in store.

Losing big must seem even more galling to him than the fact that Hillary will be the one to bring him down.

Therefore, his best recourse, even at this late date, might just be to drop out.

Surely this thought has dawned on him; it has dawned on everyone else. Now that the conventions are over, rumors that he will drop out are cropping up everywhere.

This may be nothing more than wishful thinking on the part of revanchist Republican grandees, or the desperate hopes of down ticket Republicans. Even so, where there is smoke, there sometimes is fire.

Call it “the Donald’s dilemma”: should he go forward with what he started and get trounced? Or should he defy his nature, buck up, and cut his losses?

From where he stands, both options are unthinkable.

Trump has had a lot of experience with real estate deals gone sour. He knows how to come out all right when they do — how to use bankruptcy laws and legal intimidation to impoverish others and enrich himself.

But there is no working this system: losers are just losers; and quitters are losers too. Whichever horn of the dilemma he opts for, Trump will not end up looking good.

There is a slight chance that Republicans, facing disaster, will somehow force him out of the race; the more outrageous Trump becomes – when, for instance, he calls on “Second Amendment people” to solve the Hillary problem or when he says that Obama founded the Islamic State – calls for ousting him mount.

But there is no way he could be ousted, with or without his consent, without wrecking the Republican Party even more than Trump already has. Trump will either persevere or quit; there is no third way.

And so, with no other recourse, there is nothing now for Trump to do but fabricate excuses – as he keeps on digging his own grave.

Calling the system “rigged” is a fine excuse, not least because it is true. But, again, it is not true in the way that Trump thinks.

He says that it is rigged against him; in fact, the opposite is the case. Trump got where he is because of a system that favors wheelers and dealers with political influence and inherited money, and that generates wealth through harmful and unproductive activities like gambling and real estate speculation.

However, the system is rigged against the kinds of people for whom Trump purports to speak.

The Donald could care less about that; he has no quarrel with that“system.”

His concern is just with the coming election, and his claim is just that it is rigged against him.

It is, or rather it was – unsuccessfully.

As it became clear that Trump was doing better in the primaries than anyone had expected, the Republican establishment did try to derail his campaign — in league with the plutocrats who back them and Fox News. They failed spectacularly.

They were unable to rig the election because too many of the people that used to listen to them finally realized that they were being used, and refused to go along.

The only candidate who can rightfully claim that the primary elections were rigged against his candidacy is Bernie Sanders. Circumstantial evidence of this had been overwhelming from Day One; the DNC emails that Wikileaks published established the point definitively.

No wonder that Democrats don’t want to talk about the content of those emails; that they’d rather deflect attention to unsubstantiated allegations about Russian hacking.

Expect to see a lot more of that sort of thing once Hillary moves back into the White House. When events turn sour for her, her first instinct, neocon that she is, is to demonize Vladimir Putin.

Hillary’s fondness for all things military and her Cold War instincts constitute a clear and present danger. This, not Trumpian “fascism,” is our future.

It is our future because the Democratic Party establishment succeeded, where their Republican counterparts failed. They held onto their power; at least, for now.

What about the general election coming November 8; could that be rigged?

Barack Obama nailed that one: talk about rigging a Presidential election is nonsense because elections are organized on state and local levels, making coordinated efforts to rig them impossible to organize.

Neither “the system” nor the coming election is rigged against Trump, but claiming otherwise serves his purpose. Insofar as he is resigned to accept reality, he needs excuses, and this one is the best around.

We can therefore expect Trump to spout off about it more in the weeks ahead, and for as long after that as anybody still cares.

But the System is Rigged

Regardless what Trump meant, what he said, taken literally, is true: the system is rigged – against democracy, against government of, by and for the people.

It was designed that way.

Real democracy involves more than competitive elections. In a real democracy, basic rights and liberties would be shared equally and to the greatest possible extent, and citizens would be equally empowered and therefore, in principle, equally influential.

American “democracy” is not like that at all.

In America today, the main, but not the only, obstacles in the way of the genuine article are economic inequality and institutionalized racism.

This has always been the case, though the impediments are not as transparent as they used to be.

At first, only white property holders could vote, then only white men, then only men, then finally women too; but it was not until 1965, when Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, that most African Americans in the South could finally exercise the voting rights that were theoretically theirs.

It took a very long time, as Martin Luther King said it would, but the arc of history did indeed slowly “bend towards justice.” Even so, voting rights for people of all hues and genders are still, in many respects, more theoretical than real.

Paradoxically, the closest the United States has ever come to implementing the ideal was in the early days of the republic, when citizenship rights were most restricted.

It was the same in Greek antiquity. For democratic theorists, Athenian democracy has always been a model. But the majority of adult Athenians were women or slaves, not full-fledged citizens. Only a tiny fraction of Athens’ inhabitants enjoyed any semblance of citizenship rights.

In the American case, legal and extra-legal restrictions on the franchise are not, and never have been, the whole story.

The republic’s founders also contrived institutional impediments of various kinds to keep democracy at bay. The most important is the legislative branch’s upper house, the Senate, in which each state, regardless of size, has the same representation.

There is also the Electoral College, which effectively makes the citizens of all but a dozen or so “swing states” passive observers of presidential elections.

The founders wanted to safeguard private property. They were therefore loath to empower the propertyless masses. It wasn’t until several decades after they drew up a Constitution for the republic they founded that their successors came to appreciate how useful elections could be for sustaining private property regimes.

The founders also wanted to join together states whose economies depended mainly on slavery and states whose economies depended more on commerce and “free labor.” Even after the Civil War transformed that situation fundamentally, the institutions they contrived continued to bear the mark of their origins.

Thus we still accord inordinate power to sparsely populated states; the half million or so citizens of Wyoming have the same number of Senators as thirty-nine million Californians. And yet we claim that American institutions are “exceptional” in their respect for democracy – and uphold them as models for the world.

All this drags our politics to the right – effectively guaranteeing outcomes that favor the status quo. One of many ways it does this is by marginalizing voices that come from outside what Tariq Ali has aptly called “the extreme center.”

Thus the system is indeed rigged – against efforts to democratize it, and otherwise change it for the better.

What Northern merchants, many of whom were involved in the Atlantic slave trade, and Southern slave owners started, Democrats and Republicans went on to perfect.

The duopoly party system they concocted has effectively replaced public deliberation and debate with manipulative marketing campaigns in which candidates vie for votes in the way that Coke and Pepsi compete for shares of the soft drink market – but with the difference that the Dr. Peppers of the sugar-water world stand a better chance of doing well than independent or third party candidates.

Not long ago, the situation seemed hopeless. However, we now know that it is possible, after all, to break through the duopoly’s stranglehold; both the Trump phenomenon and the Sanders insurgency demonstrated that.

Trump ran as a Republican; and he won the Republican nomination. But, in doing so, he struck a blow at the Republican Party; one from which it may never recover.

“Combinations” in restraint of trade or political influence are, like chains, only as strong as their weakest links. For his own warped and self-serving reasons, Trump inadvertently damaged, and maybe even broke, one of the links on the chain that disables democracy in the United States.

Were he not now supporting what he ostensibly ran against, Bernie Sanders could have achieved a similarly historic breakthrough. Deliberately and for democracy’s sake, he could have split the Democratic Party. And had he accepted the solicitations of Jill Stein and others, he could have helped move the Green Party out of the margins of American political life.

In other developed and not-so-developed countries, especially ones with parliamentary systems, it would be almost expected that someone in Sanders’ position would bolt from a party that treats his views, and those of his supporters, with such contempt, and that is on such a god awful course.

But our Democrats and Republicans have seen to it that independent and “third” party initiatives are non-starters.

The election was rigged against him, more effectively than it was rigged against Trump.

But had he somehow won the nomination even so, the rigged system, the one from which Trump has always benefited, would have come after him too – not because he was proposing anything more radical than many Democrats of the pre-(Bill) Clinton era supported, but because, his campaign took on a “people power” aspect that could, if unchecked, relieve them of the good deal they have going for themselves and the plutocrats they serve.

Republican elites have it in for Trump for much the same reason. But the Donald is, in the final analysis, their class brother. This is why if efforts to oust him prove unavailing, as they surely will, and if he won’t drop out on his own, as he probably won’t, most of them will end up siding with him – at least officially.

The Sanders campaign, on the other hand, threatened more than just one political party’s leaders and backers; it threatened the entire power structure of the United States. As of the time Sanders defected, the threat was still too milquetoast to threaten elite interests, but there was a danger of radicalization that defenders of the status quo could hardly ignore.

What would the power elite have made of a Sanders versus Trump contest? Would the riggers of the system complain that the system is rigged? We will never know.

We can be confident, though, that the unalloyed venom of the titans of finance, industry, and corporate media will fall upon the Green ticket of Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka, the moment it starts to look as if they could do well enough to matter.

The wrath of God, or rather “the billionaire class,” will come down upon them not so much to help Hillary against Trump — she doesn’t need help with that because Trump is more than capable of defeating himself — but to keep forces that promote real democracy, socialism, and meaningful environmentalism from becoming important factors in American politics.

If ideas were what mattered, the Stein-Baraka ticket would pose a more profound threat to the status quo and therefore to the few who benefit from it at the expense of everyone else than the Sanders campaign, at its zenith, ever could.

Their proposed Green New Deal is every bit as egalitarian and ecologically sound as Sanders’ “democratic socialism,” and, unlike Sanders, Stein and Baraka are not liberal imperialists and military hawks. They oppose what Sanders supports: the course American foreign policy is on.

But the Greens have been around seemingly forever and gotten nowhere. Even today, talk to people about Jill Stein and the most likely response will be “Jill who?”

Maybe, though, with the right kind of jolt, they, like Trump, could do what no one would have thought possible. How ironic it would be if Sanders’ endorsement of Clinton had that effect! And how wonderful!

It has been clear for a long time that the Democratic Party is beyond redemption; it is even clearer now. By supporting Clinton and therefore Clintonism (neoliberalism, imperialism and war) Sanders is making himself beyond redemption too.

But, like God, History works in mysterious ways.

Sanders relinquished his role in moving the arc of history forward when he went over to the enemy side.

But after the resistance his supporters demonstrated at the Democrats’ Philadelphia convention, and now after the Greens’ convention in Houston, the idea that the movement that got going under the aegis of his campaign can survive Sanders’ tragic – or was it treacherous? – defection is starting to look more like a serious possibility than an idle hope.

If that comes to pass, then “the system” may finally become less rigged than it presently is.

Unless and until a real revolution – not the kind Sanders talked about, but the real deal – comes back onto the agenda, a revolution that would transform “the system” itself, not just humanize it a little, this is about as good as our politics can get.

Capitalism with a human face is still capitalism, but it is way better than the Clintonite version; and the larger the role of Stein-Baraka politics in American political life, the better the prospects become for moving beyond its horizons.